Dis­as­ters can hap­pen any­where and any­time across the Caribbean. Ac­cord­ing to An­dria Grosvenor, Deputy Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor (act­ing) of the Caribbean Emer­gency Dis­as­ter Man­age­ment Agency, be­tween 2000 and 2021, the Caribbean record­ed 326 dis­as­ters as­so­ci­at­ed with nat­ur­al haz­ards, with the high­est in­ci­dence be­tween 2004 and 2017. Ac­cord­ing to the World Bank, from trop­i­cal storms to se­vere thun­der­storms to earth­quakes and vol­canic ac­tiv­i­ty, the Caribbean is the sec­ond-most dis­as­ter-prone re­gion.
 
When it comes to be­com­ing re­silient, home-grown qual­i­fied tal­ent is se­vere­ly lack­ing. To com­bat this prob­lem, The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) is launch­ing a new ma­jor, “Dis­as­ter Risk Re­silience for Agri­cul­ture and the En­vi­ron­ment,” slat­ed to be­gin in Sep­tem­ber 2022.

Ac­cord­ing to the brain­child be­hind the pro­gram, Dr. Ronald Roop­nar­ine, a Lec­tur­er in Dis­as­ter Risk Re­silience in Agri­cul­ture and the En­vi­ron­ment in the De­part­ment of Food Pro­duc­tion, “The ra­tio­nale be­hind it was re­al­ly that the Caribbean is vul­ner­a­ble to all the nat­ur­al haz­ards that we’re aware of.” 

He con­tin­ued, “When it (haz­ards) starts to af­fect peo­ple, it be­comes a dis­as­ter. To al­le­vi­ate that, we have to in­crease our re­silience, both in agri­cul­ture and the en­vi­ron­ment.” Roop­nar­ine ex­plained that there was no for­mal train­ing for per­sons in dis­as­ter risk re­silience cur­rent­ly work­ing in the var­i­ous min­istries across the Caribbean. “We thought it (the pro­gram) was very use­ful, giv­en that it was en­dorsed by al­most all the agri­cul­ture and en­vi­ron­ment min­istries across the re­gion,” Roop­nar­ine said. 

The launch of a new ma­jor came when the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go re­ject­ed the UWI’s pro­pos­al for a tu­ition fee in­crease. In­stead, the Gov­ern­ment told The UWI to re­view its ex­pen­di­ture and pay close at­ten­tion to the num­ber of cours­es of­fered and the en­rol­ment size to op­er­ate with­in its new con­strained bud­get in ear­ly June 2022.
 
Roop­nar­ine still stressed the im­por­tance of this new ma­jor, in­tend­ed for un­der­grad­u­ate stu­dents wish­ing to pur­sue a three-year de­gree. He said, “If peo­ple un­der­stand the base­line, what are the prob­lems we face? Where are the vul­ner­a­ble ar­eas? How do we ad­dress it? That is re­al­ly what this pro­gram is meant to do.”
 
The end goal, ac­cord­ing to Roop­nar­ine, is to get more peo­ple in­to this evolv­ing field and, “hope­ful­ly, when there are any is­sues in the re­gion, these per­sons will be prop­er­ly trained to ad­dress them.” 

Re­porter: Kalain Ho­sein